Tuesday, June 28, 2016

From The Los Angeles Times:http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-orlando-gay-fbi-20160623-snap-story.htmlBy Molly Hennesey-FiskeJune 23, 2016Since
the shooting at an Orlando nightclub last week that left 49 people
dead, reports have emerged that gunman Omar Mateen frequented the gay
club, used gay dating apps and had gay lovers.But the FBI has
found no evidence so far to support claims by those who say Mateen had
gay lovers or communicated on gay dating apps, several law enforcement
officials said.

Mateen, 29, told police negotiators he had carried
out the shooting that began at 2 a.m. June 12 and ended, after a
three-hour standoff, when he was killed by police.

He claimed the
shooting was carried out in allegiance to the militant group Islamic
State, as a message to halt U.S. bombing in Iraq and Syria.

Several
Pulse regulars have come forward in the days since the shooting,
claiming to have seen Mateen at the club or to have been contacted by
him on the gay dating apps Grindr, Jack’d and Adam4Adam.

On
Tuesday, Univision aired a report in which “Miguel,” a man wearing a
disguise to conceal his identity, alleged he had sex with Mateen after
meeting him on the gay dating app, Grindr. He said Mateen had sex with
other men too, including a threesome with a Puerto Rican who allegedly
told Mateen, after having had unprotected sex with him, that he was HIV
positive.

But investigators do not consider the man’s account
credible, according to one senior law enforcement official with access
to the investigation.

In seeking to verify the reports, federal
agents have culled Mateen's electronic devices, including a laptop
computer and cellphone, as well as electronic communications of those
who made the claims, law enforcement officials said.

So far, they
have found no photographs, no text messages, no smartphone apps, no gay
pornography and no cell-tower location data to suggest that Mateen — who
was twice married to women and had a young son — conducted a secret gay
life, the officials said.

The FBI is continuing to explore
Mateen’s past, but investigators now believe the men who made the claims
are not credible, or confused Mateen with someone else.

“Suddenly, mainstream culture is finding cover for the age-old hatred of Jews.”

Gabriel Groisman06/23/2016Erin
Schrode, a promising 25-year-old Jewish woman, announces her candidacy
for U.S. Congress. In response, she is bombarded by hundreds of
anti-Semitic messages: “Fire up the oven.” “Kike.” “Get out of my
country, kike. Get to Israel where you belong. That or the oven. Take
your pick.” This did not happen in the 1930s. It happened last month in California.

An
Oberlin College professor, Joy Karega, posted a photo of Jacob
Rothschild, a member of a well-known Jewish banking family, which read:
“We own nearly every central bank in the world. We financed both sides
of every war since Napoleon. We own your news, the media, your oil and
your government.” This was not published in Gleichschaltung, a Nazi newspaper. This was on her Facebook page.

Students at UC Berkley woke up one morning this past year to the words, “Zionists should be sent to the gas chamber” painted on a building.

Jewish
students at NYU, Harvard, Florida Atlantic University, and other
universities at some point or another in the past two years came home to
“Eviction” notices
posted on their doors, calling for the removal of all Jews from the
campus. Of course, the notices were fake, but the impact was certainly
real.

Anti-Semitic discourse on the internet has increased a mind-boggling 114 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to one report. Last month, one Jewish New York Times editor, Jonathan Weisman, was the target
of a coordinated Twitter attack aimed at harassing internet users who
have Jewish sounding names. Weisman was inundated with thousands of
anti-Semitic tweets. One of the many tweets depicted a trail of dollar
bills leading to an oven, another was a picture of a Menorah made of the
number 6 million (representing the number of Jews killed in the
Holocaust) — the harassment was so extreme and unrelenting that he had
no choice but to close his account.

The attack on Weisman was not
an isolated incident, but rather part of a larger anti-Semitic attack
online. A group of tech-savvy bigots created a punctuation-based code,
referred to as “(((echoes)))”
to identify and brand Jews on the Internet. This code works with
Google Chrome’s “coincidence detector” and automatically places these
“echoes” around more than 8,000 names. Once marked, the Jewish Internet
user is flooded with malicious and hateful anti-Semitic comments. The
examples are endless. Of course, this is only in the United States. The
incidents in Europe, South America and of course the Middle East are
exponentially worse.

The
Pink Pistols, which promotes ‘legal, safe and responsible’ use of guns
for self defense, helps explain the surge in interest in guns from the
LGBT community

Weapons
sales and membership in a group calling on gays and lesbians to arm
themselves in self-defense against homophobic attacks have surged since
the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida last weekend.The
group, the Pink Pistols, announced last week a tripling in acknowledged
members in the five days since a gunman killed 49 people and injured 53
in an attack on Pulse in Orlando in the early hours of 12 June.

The
Pink Pistols, a gun club predominantly for LGBT members and their
supporters, promotes “legal, safe and responsible use of firearms for
self defense of the sexual minority community” according to its website.

A
senior Pink Pistols member said that if patrons had been armed at the
Orlando nightclub they might have prevented the shooting or minimized
loss of life.

“I think there is a possibility that it could have
prevented it … or helped to make the death toll less. If we could have
sent one more person home to their family alive instead of in a body bag
that would have been something,” said Gwen Patton, a spokeswoman for
the Pink Pistols.

Patton said that membership of the group’s Facebook page
had tripled from 1,500 before the Orlando massacre to 4,500 by
Thursday. But with no formal registration system or fees for joining the
Pink Pistols, there were no reliable membership numbers available for
the group itself, she said.

The apparent surge in interest in guns
from the LGBT community comes as posters and flags have been reported
at a number of locations, including streets in Los Angeles’s gay neighborhood West Hollywood and outside a controversial event in Orlando, depicting a rainbow version of the revolutionary war-era Gadsden Flag – a flag more usually associated with Tea Party conservatives than with gay rights activism.

Some
of the Gadsden symbols seen deploy the anti-government slogan “Don’t
tread on me” beneath the traditional image of a snake poised to strike,
while others have substituted a seeming call to arms via social media, “#ShootBack”, on a rainbow-striped background, the color scheme long ago adopted by the gay equality movement.

That’s the chilling assessment a former ISIS
captive has given U.S. lawmakers, recounting her harrowing tale of
living in the grip of an international terrorist organization.

“Orlando will be repeated if the world doesn't put an end [to] such terrorism. There is no sanctuary,” human rights activist Nadia Murad told the Senate Homeland Security Committee at the start of a hearing Tuesday.

The committee held the hearing to gain insight into what committee Chairman Sen. Ron Johnson,
R-Wis., called the “poisonous ideology” of ISIS and “how it results in
the slaughter of innocents,” such as at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando,
where an ISIS-inspired gunman killed 49 people and wounded scores more.

“[This]
terrorist attack in Orlando continues the alarming trend of attacks on
soft targets here in the U.S. and abroad,” Johnson said. “ISIS’
brutality towards women, homosexuals and other groups is overt, and
these communities will continue to be vulnerable until ISIS is
defeated.”

Murad, part of the non-Muslim Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria, was forced by ISIS to become a sex slave when she was 19, she said.

Sometimes
the build-up of pressure is just too much. You see it in nature - the
force of two tectonic plates converging along a fault line. Shuddering
out earthquakes, forcing up mountains, causing volcanoes to scream and
spew lava down themselves.

Society is just the same. Simmering tensions boiling over into road rage, an angry exchange, knives drawn in the street.

Opposing forces shunting against each other so violently, eventually something gives. Someone gives.

And so it has been with Orlando. Islam against homosexuality.

Forty nine dead. Fifty one injured.

And
the shock waves of this human earthquake spread fast. The ground
whipped out from under the feet of a hundred sleeping mothers, some
clutching phones, still listening to their frightened children's last,
terrified messages.

How
much longer can we continue to deny a fault line has been drawn? On one
side Islam and Muslims defined by it. On the other the LGBT community,
defined by their right to love as they please.

Over
the last two days, the deference of the liberal Left to Muslims over
the LGBT community has been excruciating to watch. Unable to reconcile
the two causes they champion, they have an awkward inconvenience they
dare not face. An ex-wife at a wedding, acknowledged with an invitation,
but sat at the back, facing the air-con unit.

“The
gunman entered the bathroom and was shooting his machine gun, so we are
all like scrambling around in the bathroom, screaming at the top of our
lungs when he was in there for the first time and then, you know,
people are getting hit by bullets, like blood is everywhere and then
there was a moment where he stopped shooting in the bathroom and that’s
when everyone looked around and that’s when I first realized that my leg
was shot …

There were several other people shot and bleeding in
the bathroom. That’s when Akyra [Monet Murray], who didn’t make it,
realized she was shot in her arm … and I’m not sure that was when Tiara
also got shot in her thigh but … we were all pretty bad, at that point
this is when we knew this wasn’t a game. This was real and this was
something that was really happening to us right now.It was a shock. We went from having the time of our lives to the worst night of our lives all within a matter of minutes.

Throughout
that period of hours, the gunman was in there with us. He actually made
a call to 911 from in there. Everybody could hear – who was in the
bathroom, who survived. We could hear him talking to 911, saying that
the reason why he’s doing this is because he wants America to stop
bombing his country. From that conversation, from 911, he pledged
allegiance to Isis, he started speaking in, I believe … after he get off
the phone with 911, he started speaking in Arabic … at first I didn’t
know what the language was. And after that, he even spoke to us directly
in the bathroom. He said: ‘Are there any black people in here?’ I was
too afraid to answer, but there was an African American male in the
stall where most of my body was, where a majority of my body was, had
answered and he said, ‘Yes, there are about six or seven of us,’ and the
gunman responded back to him saying, ‘You know that I don’t have a
problem with black people, this is about my country. You guys suffered
enough.’

He made a statement saying it wasn’t about black people.
This isn’t the reason why he was doing this. But through the
conversation with 911, he said that the reason why he was doing this is
that he wanted America to stop bombing his country. So, the motive was
very clear to us who were laying in our own blood and other people’s
blood, who were injured, who were shot. We knew what his motive was and
that he wasn’t going to stop killing people until he was killed, until
he felt like his message got out there.

First
they came for the bloggers, the atheists, the secular intellectuals.
Then the three-year murder spree spread to aid workers, minority
religions and Muslims who did not want their country reshaped by
extremist Islam

The
attack on Professor Rezaul Karim Siddiquee was so frenzied that its
traces remain more than a month later, arcs of dried blood spattered up a
pink wall and a pile of sand covering bloodstains that had pooled on
the ground where the softly spoken lecturer was all but beheaded.

He
was killed on his way to work in the city of Rajshahi by four men who
knew their target and his routines well. At least one of the killers was
a former student who had a reputation for barracking the professor in
class about the “immorality” of the English literature he taught, police
believe.

Neighbours in the narrow alley where Siddiquee was
murdered overheard him greet someone moments before his death. “You’re
here?” he asked his killer. His final words were spoken in surprise but
not fear, because Siddiquee never imagined that he would be a target for
extremists, his family says.

The murder fitted into a pattern
laid down over a gruesome three-year killing spree by extremist groups
in Bangladesh: a bloody but brutal attack in broad daylight with the
most basic of weapons, and later a claim of responsibility from Islamic State (Isis) or al-Qaida.

But
it was also a warning of the way the killers have expanded their
campaign, from a focused assault on secular activists into a wider war
to reshape Bangladeshi society along lines determined by Islamist
extremists.

Siddiquee was an observant believer who regularly
attended prayers and even paid for the renovation of the mosque in his
ancestral village – his was the most anodyne of public profiles. If he
was a target, surely millions of other Bangladeshis are too.

“What
he was, we all are. If a person like him who loves to read, recite
literature and play music at home can be killed, all of us are liable to
be next,” said one of Siddiquee’s colleagues, asking not to be named
for fear it could push him up a list of possible targets.

Foreigners,
religious minorities from Hindus to Christians, Muslims from other
sects and even Sunnis who subscribe to a more generous vision of faith
than their attackers, are all now at risk.Since 2013, 30 people
have been murdered. They were from all faiths and social backgrounds,
linked above all by the manner of their deaths, at the hands of men
wielding machetes, knives and even swords. At least three others barely
escaped assassination attempts, surviving with scars on their faces and
necks that look like medieval battle injuries.

One, Ahmed Rahim
Tutul (pictured on page 15), survived only because he fell between a
table and chair as a militant slashed at his head with a sword in an
attack that left terrible scars across his face.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened an institutionalized Muslim homophobia.

By Ayaan Hirsi AliJune 13, 2016

The
Orlando massacre is a hideous reminder to Americans that homophobia is
an integral part of Islamic extremism. That isn’t to say that some
people of other faiths and ideologies aren’t hostile to members of the
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, community. Nor is to
say that Islamic extremists don’t target other minorities, in addition
to engaging in wholly indiscriminate violence. But it is important to
establish why a man like Omar Mateen could be motivated to murder 49
people in a gay nightclub, interrupting the slaughter, as
law-enforcement officials reported, to dial 911, proclaim his support
for Islamic State and then pray to Allah.

I offer an explanation in the form of four propositions.

1.
Muslim homophobia is institutionalized. Islamic law as derived from
scripture, and as evolved over several centuries, not only condemns but
prescribes cruel and unusual punishments for homosexuality.

2. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws that criminalize and punish homosexuals in line with Islamic law.

3.
It is thus not surprising that the attitudes of Muslims in
Muslim-majority countries are homophobic and that many people from those
countries take those attitudes with them when they migrate to the West.

4.
The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened the intolerance
toward homosexuality. Extremists don’t just commit violence against LGBT
people. They also spread the prejudice globally by preaching that
homosexuality is a disease and a crime.

Not all Muslims are
homophobic. Many are gay or lesbian themselves. Some even have the
courage to venture into the gender fluidity that the 21st century West
has come to recognize. But these LGBT Muslims are running directly
counter to their religion.

After
being written off as a racist Islamophobe for fifteen years because I
raised precisely the same points that both Carl Bernstein (!) and Barney
Frank (!) raised earlier today; after viewing the sweet, doomed faces
of the 49 murdered gay and perhaps non-gay people, mainly Latinos and
Latinas, often people of color, on my TV screen—what do I have to say?

The
question I and others have raised since 9/11 (for me, since the
Intifada against the Jews that began in 2000), was: “How many bodies
will it take for Americans, especially the intelligentsia, including the
feminists, including gay people, including our elected officials,
before they understand that we: (the West, America, Jews, Christians,
Hindus, Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents) have a very real enemy?" It is
radical Islam or Islamism, Islamic Jihad or, if you prefer, Islamist
Jihad; and it is not going away anytime soon.

This is precisely
what Israel alone has been up against since its founding in 1948.
Actually, long before that, Jews suffered the most profound Islamic
anti-Semitism. Buddhists in Afghanistan were murdered or forcibly
converted. Hindus in India were slaughtered by Muslims by the
millions—simply because they were Hindus. Christians have long been
persecuted by Muslims for the same reason; that persecution continues
today.

Clearly, more than 3,000 bodies on 9/11 were not enough.
Clearly, the many millions of Muslims murdered by Muslim Jihadists have
not been enough. Will the murder of 49 gay Americans finally be
“enough?”

Somehow I doubt it but I certainly hope so. Of course,
sure, yes, let’s ban assault rifles completely. That will not stop
someone like Omar Mateen. But the handguns and the rifles are not as
important as banning and abolishing the routine hate of women, the
“wrong” kind of Muslim, ex-Muslim apostates, homosexuals—hatreds that
are intimately part of historic Islam.

How many deaths before we
become effective in identifying potential Jihadists? Within our borders?
Arriving as refugees and immigrants? How many deaths before we are
willing to use the word “Muslim terrorist” without fearing we will be
demonized for doing so?

Your home doesn't need to be picture-perfect to invite people over.

My friends Dana and John perfectly practice what the Rev. Jack King referred to as "scruffy hospitality."
Their kitchen is small. The wood cabinets are dark and a few decades
old. Spices and jars for sugar and flour line the countertops because
there's nowhere else to put them. A tall, round table shoved in a corner
has mismatched bar stools crammed around it.

The sliding glass
doors in the kitchen lead to a back deck with a well-used chiminea, an
outdoor table and a large variety of chairs and cushions, many of them
bought at yard sales. We circle the chairs around the chiminea on
weekend nights during all four seasons, whenever Dana and John put out a
simple call out through text or Facebook that says, "Fire tonight!"

There
will always be food, but like the bar stools and deck chairs, the food
is mismatched. Our hosts provide some food. John may have the urge to
make jalapeño poppers or Dana may put together some version of salsa
with whatever's fresh from the garden, but there's not a formally
prepared meal. Everyone just brings something. It's perfectly
acceptable, encouraged even, to bring odds and ends of foods that need
to get used up. I often bring wedges of cheese that have already been
cut into or half a baguette to slice up and toast to dip in hummus.
Everyone brings a little something to drink. And it's a glorious feast.

This
kitchen and deck won't be featured in in Better Homes and Gardens
anytime soon, but maybe they should be. They are two of the most
hospitable spaces I know. By opening up their home as-is, Dana and John
are the most gracious hosts I know. I almost wrote "by opening up their
home with its imperfections," but that's not accurate. Their home is
perfect — just like it is.

What is scruffy hospitality? On his blog, Father Jack defines scruffy hospitality this way:

Scruffy
hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be
in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy
hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a
simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy
hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than
the impression your home or lawn makes. If we only share meals with
friends when we’re excellent, we aren’t truly sharing life together.

He encourages people not to allow an unfinished to-do list to stop us from opening our homes to friends and family.

I
agree, but here's the problem. It's hard to let go of the belief that
our homes need to be picture-perfect — or maybe I should say
"Pinterest-perfect" — before we can welcome guests. But the idea that we
must make our home look un-lived in before having people over stops so
many of us from sharing life together.

A
young Pakistani woman died Wednesday after she was tortured and set
alight in the country’s conservative northeast for refusing a marriage
proposal from the son of a former colleague, relatives and police said.

Maria
Sadaqat, 19, was attacked by a group of people on Monday in the village
of Upper Dewal close to the summer hill resort of Murree, outside the
capital Islamabad.

“She was badly tortured and then burned alive.
We brought her to hospital in Islamabad but she succumbed to her wounds
today,” Abdul Basit, Sadaqat’s uncle, told AFP outside a burns centre at
Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in the capital.

Grieving
relatives outside the centre wept and protested at the teenager’s death
as police moved her body to another hospital for a post-mortem.

Basit
said his niece had been attacked by the principal of the private school
where she had formerly worked as a teacher, and by his accomplices
after she refused a marriage proposal from his son.

“He
was divorced and twice her age, so she refused the proposal and left
her job when they pursued her time and again… eventually they attacked
her,” Basit said.

Police said Sadaqat gave a statement before her death naming the principal and four others as her attackers.

“We
have arrested at least one of the accused and a hunt is on for the
rest,” Mazhar Iqbal, the officer directing the murder investigation,
told AFP.

A doctor at the hospital said Sadaqat had succumbed to serious burns.

“The
poor woman was becoming better but then could not survive because most
parts of her body had serious burn injuries,” said Ayesha Ihsani.

It was the second time in just over a month that a Pakistani woman had been murdered over a marriage issue.

It has always boggled my mind as to why women or lGBT people would
embrace any religion when all religions seem to have core beliefs that
women and LGBT people are sub-human. Further all religions seem to use
imaginary invisible sky bullies to enforce submissiveness and acceptance
of that degraded status upon those people whom powerful male elites
choose to abuse.

New Pew Research Center data offer further evidence that conservatism is chasing women from organized religion

A new Pew Research Center analysis
of General Social Survey data confirms a long-simmering trend in U.S.
religious observance: While attendance at religious services has
declined for all Americans, it has declined more among women than men.

In
the early 1970s, 36 percent of women and 26 percent of men reported
attending church services weekly, a ten-point gap that reflected the
long-standing trend of women being more religiously committed than men.

The
gap reached its widest point in 1982, when it hit 13 percent, but then
it began to shrink. By 2012, 22 percent of men reported attending church
weekly, as did 28 percent of women, reflecting a “worship gap” of only
six percent, an historic low.

Pew’s David McClendon gives several
possible reasons for women’s declining levels of religiosity as measured
by church attendance. One is the increase in the number of women in the
workforce, which could theoretically decrease their leisure time and
force them to cut back on activities like church. But as McClendon
himself notes, “the fastest increase in women’s full-time employment”
actually “occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which time
the gender gap on religious service attendance actually widened somewhat.”

If
women aren’t too busy with work to go to church, maybe it’s because
they’re becoming too well educated. Higher rates of educational
attainment are correlated to less church going, except McClendon notes
that both more educated and less educated women are going to church
less.Finally, McClendon notes that the growth of the “nones”
appears to having contributed to women’s declining church attendance, as
“the rate of growth in the unaffiliated has been slightly more rapid
for women than men,” which has “helped narrow the gender gap in weekly
attendance.”

But it seems likely that more women becoming
unaffiliated is part and parcel of the same trend of more women staying
away from church. It still doesn’t explain why this is happening.

What
McClendon overlooks is that the years that women’s church attendance
began to decline are the very years when religious leaders in the
Catholic Church and the evangelical movement fused religion with the
culture wars, with overall attendance for women taking it’s first steep
drop in the 1980s.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson